Aloha, and welcome back! It would be an understatement to say that lots of things have changed ever since our last update on the Wiki. The world is going through a pandemic, and on top of that, we are facing a political and financial crisis. It’s not looking great for this year so far, so first and foremost, we hope that you’re all safe and well! 

On the bright side, summer is finally upon us! This is the time to take a break, enjoy the weather and go back to normal, even if it is just for a moment (mind you, social distancing is still in place, of course!). If you’ve had the chance to check out Mineplex recently, you might have noticed that as a minigame server, it has been a big winner of the coronavirus outbreak, with their player count more than doubling! 

Keeping that in mind, we obviously want to keep the Wiki tidy and clean for the increased amounts of visitors. There have been plenty of cool changes we want to share with you today, plus there’s so many more to come later this year. So why not grab yourself a nice drink, a comfy spot and dive right in, hm?

Remarkable contributions

Over the past few months, many dedicated editors of the wiki have spent lots of time ensuring that the wiki stays a reputable source of knowledge for the server. In this section of the newsletter, we would like to focus on some of the users that have made a tremendous impact on both the reputability and overall appearance of the wiki. 

Our first spotlight this time is on Sncwie. With 30 edits since joining the wiki in March 2020, Sncwie is very dedicated to keeping the wiki a valid source of knowledge for all and puts a lot of time and effort into editing different articles, whether it be ranks, games, or even more!

Next, we’d also like to thank BlueandGreen! He is an ex-wiki staff member who has put a tremendous amount of effort into the wiki in all aspects. More recently, he’s made somewhat of a return and now spends lots of time ensuring that the wiki is up to date, clean, and reputable. 

One final shoutout goes to someone who has been working very hard over the past few months to keep the Wiki updated and accurate: TheBlueComet481! A current builder for the Mineplex network, he is constantly editing many different articles whether about the build team or just Mineplex in general. Showing his interest in- and outside of the Wiki, he is definitely deserving of the Featured User award. Congrats!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Feedback from polls

In the last newsletter, we asked a few different questions about various topics and aspects of the wiki to see how we could improve them. We are going to have a look through each one of them and the feedback it received here!

Mobile Readability

Judging from the poll results, it appears that most of you do not often use your mobile to browse through the wiki. 75% of you said that mobile readability could be worth a fix in some articles around the place, but it shouldn’t be a major concern. This is also backed up by the wiki statistics administrators have access to, which suggest that about ⅔ of our user base uses a desktop. Thus, while we are definitely going to take it into account while creating new articles in the future, it is very unlikely that we are going to go through all the older articles to improve them for mobile users, unless they are extremely messy. 

Newsletters

Overall, 2 people would be happy to see the newsletters carry on, 5 think that the time spent on them could be spent on something more useful and announcements for major changes would be enough, and 1 person does not read them or care about them. From our perspective, except for polls, newsletters don’t get that much engagement. They are also quite a bit of a challenge for us to release in time or release at all as we are all rather busy, and do not have that much time to dedicate anymore. Hence, while we are not quite sure what is gonna happen to them yet, this might be the last one for a while since we are considering to put newsletters on hold temporarily. However, we expect things to change around the wiki in the future and its relation with the server, which signifies that there is a possibility they will return if there is a demand and more people around!

Rules

This one is straightforward. 100% of the votes said that the current community policy and rules were fine. Unless something major is brought up, we will most likely not change or add any rules in the near future.

Bedrock Content

2 people were focusing more on Bedrock articles, whereas 5 did not think it should be our main focus at the moment. Currently, we do have some articles about Bedrock games and features, but the issue is that most of the active editors actively play Java. Thus, we cannot really document stuff we are not entirely familiar with. In the future, if we get the Mineplex community to engage more with our platform then perhaps we could encourage more Bedrock articles to be written, but it is not our biggest priority as it currently stands. We have yet to finish all the server subteams and Java Nano Games pages, which we think is more important before starting a wider expansion.

Visualizations

This was about the layout of the pages and whether they had too much images / we should focus more on text. While this did not get a lot of votes, it appears that most people do not care or think it is currently fine as it is. Therefore, in the future we will most likely keep on writing articles the same way as we do nowadays, but we will keep in mind that too much images can cause loading issues, especially on low-end devices.

Usage of the wiki

We were quite surprised to see that most of you use the wiki to look up information about older, or previous games, features and updates! The content which is the most interesting to you guys is both general information on broader topics (hackers, GWEN, reports) and factual information, statistics and analytics (kit stats and game balance). We will thus try to make sure that the relevant articles are always up to date and available. 

Design Choices

For the theme, 1 reader wants light, 2 readers want dark and 1 reader does not mind. We did experiment with a black theme in the past during seasonal events (Halloween), and people seemed to have enjoyed it. While it is not a priority at the moment, we will consider reintroducing a black theme for a longer period of time to see whether it is an improvement or not. 

As for the general article layout and design, everyone voted for having professional-looking, Wikipedia-like articles without flashy colours or fancy fonts. This is great news as we believe this is already the case for most of our articles at the moment, so not too much change is required. However we invite you to debate on any change you think would be necessary in the #wiki-discussion channel of our discord.

Thank you very much for giving your input and feedback, this is really helpful in order to stay on the right track and focus on stuff which actually matters to the wiki users and reflects what they want!

New staff member !

Even though we had SophOG resign from her administrator position at the beginning of the year, we are delighted to announce that Saltyfishhy will be joining the wiki staff team as a content moderator! Here is a few words from him:

Heyo! I’m Saltyfishhy, and I’ve been a member of the Mineplex community for about 6 years now. I’ve always been interested in contributing to the community and the network itself, and more recently I’ve discovered the Mineplex Wiki! As a little bit about myself, my favorite game on Mineplex is probably Speed Builders, and as a close second I’d have to say Super Smash Mobs. These days you’ll likely see me chilling in lobby one, however.

This is great news for us as we are always willing to see the wiki team and active users grow, as not only does it positively impact the quality of the content available, but it also allows us to realise more of our plans and projects for 2020! Speaking of...

Going Forward

Aside from several internal updates and additions, there haven’t been many content updates visible to regular readers. This is about to change though: Our schedule for 2020 is packed with exciting projects! Today, we’ll just name some of them which will be our main focus during the next months.

The mysterious CoM project?

If you’ve taken a look at our public project overview before, you might have noticed that one card has remained untouched for over a year now. But has it really? Today I’m happy to confirm that what might be our biggest collaboration to date is still in the making, and we’re now working on it at full steam. We will keep you updated on its progress over the course of the next few months. Stay tuned!

Discord server overhaul

Our Wiki Discord server is far from optimized, and we heavily rely on the use of third-party bots to make features like the Wiki integration and moderation possible. Even though it will only be a side project, we are planning to develop and implement our own bot to make more features possible, which also comes with an improved experience for all of our server members. We are considering to add features like:

• Wiki ↔ Discord account linking
• An upgraded report system for Vandalism/malicious edits on the Wiki
• An enhanced verification system for Mineplex Staff & GI members

We’re still in the planning phases, so if you have any other suggestions, let us know!

Unified Community Platform

The UCP is a major upcoming change, affecting all FANDOM & Gamepedia Wikis in the near future. It will come with a massively updated editor, improved mobile device support, and much more! To prepare for this, we will be undergoing some changes sooner or later. We’re not quite ready for the move towards the new platform just yet, simply because some features (like the forums this newsletter is being posted in) are not fully functional on the new platform, but we will make way for it soon. Read more about it here!

Upcoming content

Welp, that’s a lot to look forward to! If you want to give feedback on our current projects, feel free to check out our public trello board.

Content-wise, we wanted to do something special based on the poll results this time. Seeing that you guys are primarily interested in removed games, and UHC has been frequently requested to make a return in the Mineplex community, we decided to focus on our Ultra Hardcore page throughout the next weeks! UHC has actually been a featured article before, but we felt that it could still use some improvement in terms of content and layout. Be sure to help out and start editing the page if you have anything to share about UHC, be it factual information, screenshots, clips or anything of the like. 

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks, and stay safe!

Hello there 2020! It might be with a delay, but we still wanted to wish you a happy new year. We hope you all had a great start into the new decade!

As for the Wiki, we’ve tried our best to get this newsletter out as soon as possible. It’s slowly becoming a tradition for us to gather community feedback at the beginning of each year, since it’s very important to us what you guys think. Of course, this is not the only topic which awaits you in this issue. There’s a lot in store for you today, so why don’t we dive right in?!

Remarkable contributions

Thanks to MachoPiggies for making countless edits as well as creating some new pages in November!

Welcome back Prism55Writes! It’s been some time since he was last active, but he’s made some smaller changes recently.

Vanessa1375 deserves a big shoutout for keeping many subteam pages up to date, as well as her valued contributions throughout the last year! Thank you :)

Saltyfishhy only recently joined us, but he contributed to a number of articles already. Sounds like we’ve found our Featured Contributor for the Winter season, congrats!

Once again, thanks to all of you for your work here! We really appreciate it.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Okay, let’s talk about polls first. Last year we’ve had a batch of questions for you to answer already, and by bringing some of them up again, we’d like to see if your opinion changed. Next to that, there’s a lot of new questions on recent topics too, so be sure to answer them to the best of your ability! Of course, feedback is always appreciated outside of polls too, so if you have any other thoughts to share, let us know in the comments.

Mobile readability

This is one of the questions we already asked you last year. We’ve done some small improvements here and there to clean up and improve the experience for our mobile readers (smartphones, tablets etc.). Unfortunately, FANDOM doesn’t provide many useful tools to allow for design changes, and it is difficult to get around their restrictions. Still, we’d like to see if you feel strongly about improving the current situation.

Newsletters

As you can see, we’ve had lots of trouble releasing these newsletters every month. We’ve now switched to a quartely release schedule, which means we’re aiming for one new issue every 3 months. Last year, you’ve clearly shown how much you’d like to see our newsletters continue, but with each new release, we question if you actually enjoy them, since they require a lot of preparation each time. So, here’s the poll:

Rules

Aside from a fancy redesign by BlueandGreen, our community policy hasn’t undergone many changes last year. Being a topic which affects all of us more or less, we’d still like to see your opinion on it though.

Bedrock content

Despite seeing a lot of Bedrock player contributions on our page, it’s undeniable our main focus is still on the Java edition. How important is Bedrock as a platform to you?

Visualizations

With the main focus of our Wiki being on a Minecraft server, it’s no surprise that our readers prefer short, concise articles over walls of text. Images and videos can help in breaking up long paragraphs. What do you think about them?

Usage of the Wiki

The Wiki offers a wide range of content, and our readers’ interests aren’t always clear to us. To find out what areas we should prioritize, here’s two questions for you!

Design choices

Unlike in previous years, we’ve been experimental with our layout and tried many new designs, such as a dark mode (with white text), new backgrounds and more. Let us know more about your reader experience below.

Those are all the polls we have for you today. Thanks a lot for answering them! We’ll evaluate your responses internally and announce the results later. Now for the interesting part: our 2019 Year review!

Year Review

The beginning of each year marks an exciting event for all of us: in January, the Wiki celebrates its anniversary following its creation in 2013. If you haven’t seen my blog post on it yet, check it out here! Since the 5th anniversary was a large milestone for all of us who’ve worked on the Wiki over the years, we’ve released a temporary design to celebrate it. It’s hard to believe that we’ve already passed our 6th anniversary this year, but we’re still going strong!

Only a few weeks later, we launched our Wiki Discord server. This was something I had been considering for a while, but I definitely didn’t expect the massive turnout! Thanks to over 100 of you for joining us. And – in case you’re not a member yet – don’t fret! We’re always open for newbies, so come join us now :)

In March, BaconAnEggs surprised all of us with the sudden creation of dozens of pages and over 800 edits in only one week. He started working on an article for each staff member, which would unfortunately later prove to be too inconvenient to handle. Regardless, we still appreciate your hard work, which started and led what was probably the most passionate project for our Wiki in 2019!

Following the staff pages creation, we began working on another one of our plans during Summer: the Translations project. Although it hasn’t been completed yet due to inconsistencies of the official rules document and conflicts with the workload of the Translations Team, we’re hoping to fully launch the project soon.

Aside from that, the Wiki has seen many overhauls to basic functionality in the last year. We’ve revamped the staff application system, the punishment system, the rules and policies, the History pages, the verification system, but most importantly, the project management structure. With the release of our public Trello board, we created an easy way to offer an overview of our current plans for the Wiki. Not only that, everyone (yes, you too!) is able to comment on them at any time. Feel free to check out the board from time to time here!

In terms of new staff members, last year has surely been a surprise too! With Nicodami stepping up to become a Bureaucrat and SophOG as our newest Administrator in July, we’ve seen two very experienced Mineplex community members join the Wiki staff team. Their help with various projects is definitely appreciated. As always, we’re looking for new staff members, so be sure to check out the application hub. We would be excited to read your application if you’re interested!

Back in November, we finally completed the staff page archival. All that remains are Admin+ pages, as they do not require as many updates, and are of higher interest to our readers than volunteer staff pages. If you want to take a quick look at the 200+ archived pages, check out the Wiki archive here.

As for December, we’ve decided once again to introduce a new layout and background for the holiday season. This was our second attempt at introducing a dark theme, which was unfortunately removed shortly afterwards after noticing some conflicts with older article designs. Still, we’ve kept this freezing cold blue color palette until today. By the way, we’ve also enabled an animated background with snowflakes. If you’re interested in enabling it, continue reading below!

var className = "CustomSnowElement";
var flakeWidth = 32;
var flakeHeight = 32;
 
importArticles({
    type: 'script',
    articles: [
        'u:dev:MediaWiki:SnowStorm.js',
    ]
});

The final major change for 2019 were the updated Minigame infoboxes. This might not sound like much, but it enables us to do so much more with the Wiki design. The template is also more customizable than before. We haven’t noticed any issues with it yet, but if you do happen to come across some glitches, please let us know \o/

And here we are, back in the present! We hope you liked our short recap of last year’s events. Since we’re already some weeks into 2020, we’ve got some changes to document from this year too.

First of all, we replaced the news panel on the homepage with a dynamic rss feed. What does that mean? Well, it will update automatically without requiring manual edits now. Every time an announcement on Mineplex is made, it’ll show up in the small box on the right side of the homepage now.

This is more of a small change, but if you play Mineplex on the Java edition of Minecraft, you might’ve heard of Communities already. Well, there’s one for the Wiki now! Come join us by typing /com join MineplexWiki in-game! ^-^

And we have one last, rather unfortunate announcement. SophOG has decided to step down from her position as administrator for personal reasons. Still, her work won’t be forgotten. Thanks for all you’ve done on the team :)

Upcoming content

What’s next for us? Well, we’ll aim to focus on the Translations project for now. The concept is good to go, so we should be able to get started soon(TM). The CoM talks also haven’t been forgotten, but due to a lack of time on our ends, we haven’t been able to make any progress lately. The winter design will disappear soon, so enjoy it while you can! We will return to the classic look after February. Finally, Rose Rush will be our next featured game. It was re-introduced on Java only today, so our readers will surely be interested in a well-crafted article. That’s why we need you to get it up to date again. Feel free to help out wherever you can, be it with additional tips or even videos.

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s to a great 2020!

I found a "Rare Finn n' Jake" from Carl's Spinner and I don't know what it is or how to equip? Thank you!

Hi does anybody know where I can find the music from the mineplex lobby? I've been trying to find it on YouTube etc and it's impossible haha, Thanks guys ?

2 months later, and we are back! Although it may seem like we skipped a newsletter, it is intentional. We have decided that it would be better if we released a newsletter every other month, thus covering 2 months in one newsletter. Anyway, let’s jump straight into it! 

Remarkable contributions

The past months have been quite busy in terms of edits! We’ve seen a few new member joining us, as well as older ones who suddenly went on a streak of edits. It’s nice to see that your trick-or-treating hasn’t impacted the involvement on the platform!

• MachoPiggies went through a great amount of pages, improving, fixing and updating them! The amount of work done was so impressive, it would not have made sense to not award him one of the 2 User of the Month titles! Congrats! 

• Vanessa1375 went around editing a few pages, which include Classics Cow, Streams Team or even Content Creator Council!

• BlueandGreen also contributed in a more technical way by targeting cosmetics pages as well as improving some templates.

• DCPlaysMC edited the Power Play Club page.

• Heckingss mainly focused on working on various teams and subteams pages, such as Rules Committee and Quality Assurance Testing to only name a few. We thought his numerous contributions were quite pertinent, hence he will be able to enjoy the 2nd ‘User of the Month’ tag given along with this newsletter. Congrats!

• Xukuri, THELichCA and Surved edited a bunch of miscellaneous pages.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

During Halloween, you probably noticed that your eyes have been treated with a dark and spooky theme! As this period is heavily celebrated on Mineplex - especially through the 2019 Halloween Event which included the return of Halloween Havoc - we had no reason to pretend nothing was going on around here. Although we received a lot of positive feedback on the general aspect of the wiki, the colour being pretty much inverted led to some displaying issues around some templates… Sorry about that! Anyway, did you enjoy that theme? What do you think should have been improved? What would you like to see if something similar was done to celebrate Christmas? Please make sure to vote on the poll below and let us aware of any ideas you may have through the comments!

Over the last weeks, BlueandGreen overhauled some of the cosmetics pages, which sparked a discussion about their layout on our discord server. Not only is there some information we’d like to add to the main tables (the rarity of cosmetics, for instance), but the large galleries of some pages have proven to be highly inconvenient for our mobile readers, too. To combat this, we’re considering to move all animated images to a dedicated subpage. This would allow us to improve the general design of the galleries (such as by sorting and categorizing the GIFs), as well as speeding up the load times of the main pages and lowering data usage. What do you think about this?

Another small change is the recent addition of the Wikia Bot to our discord server! Our little helper is connected to the Wiki, and provides some interesting statistics on the page, and many more useful commands. Use !wikia help for a quick overview of all features.

Finally, here’s the results of our Halloween giveaway! Our 3 winners are:

• AceSJus

• Jaekub

• killer10

Congrats to you all! Be sure to message Mining on Discord to claim your prize. If you haven’t won anything this time, don’t worry! We might do another giveaway in the future.

Upcoming content

For our next featured minigame, we wanted to do something special: We’ve chosen a Bedrock game. The article for Dragons wasn’t even created yet, but that is about to change. If you’re a bedrock player, feel free to contribute to the page, because there’s obviously a lot missing.

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks!

Welcome back! It’s been a while since the last newsletter was released, and while we tried our hardest to work on an issue for you last month, our holiday vacations took up most of our time. No worries though, we’re back with even more this time: double the content, double the fun.

Remarkable contributions

We are very happy to see so many dedicated editors on the Wiki, and we don’t want to miss the opportunity to show you our appreciation! Here’s some of the users with the most outstanding work in the last months – July and August:

• Vanessa1375 removed tons of small mistakes she came across. Thanks!

• Welcome DanielW231! As one of the newest editors, he already made lots of changes.

• Even after earning themselves the User of the Month tag last time, Musmak continued to improve various articles. Thank you!
• With tons of new images added, we’d like to give a special thanks to YeeterFamGang.Great job, and congrats on becoming our User of the Month for your efforts in July!
• After his long absence, BlueandGreen has racked up hundreds of edits in almost no time, with one of his main projects being the Mineplex Discord article, which has now more than doubled in size. Great to see you back, and with no surprise – the User of the Month tag for August goes to you!

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Over the last months, we’ve made plans to rework the staff verification system. Until now, we had a large range of tags which users could choose to receive, including Quality Assurance, Event Assistance and others. With this update, we’ve narrowed it down to Mineplex Staff and Game Insights tags, to accurately highlight the users who have extensive knowledge of the server. Along with that, we’ve also renamed the “Verified Mineplex Staff” tag to just “Mineplex Staff” – it was a bit redundant, wasn’t it? Last but not least, we now have a Discord verification in place as well, so if you’re either Mineplex staff or GI, don’t hesitate to contact us to have your tags applied to your account!

Staff pages have repeatedly shown to be a huge issue, and we’ve finally decided to remove all staff pages (excluding Admin+). We have already prepared an archive for the retired staff member articles, which means none of the information in the articles is lost. We thank each and everyone of you for your efforts on these pages, but please understand that we have grossly underestimated the work connected to keeping them updated. Feel free to take a look at Mineplex Wiki:Archive to see the removed pages. Needless to say, there are no plans to remove any other pages at the moment.

If you’ve paid close attention to the edit logs, you might have noticed that we deleted a seemingly harmless article about Staff Commands. Don’t worry, none of us went rogue! :) We have actually been asked by a Mineplex administrator to take down the page because it contained confidential information. To elaborate a bit more, they requested that we should not specify the commands which are in use by staff only. In the future, we will try to rework the article so that it does not violate Mineplex’s staff policy, as we would like to maintain a good relationship with the server. Thanks for understanding!

Upcoming content

Our next featured game will be Super Smash Mobs Domination! Being one of the longest standing games on the network, the article could certainly use a cosmetic makeover. Feel free to help us update the page.

That’s it for today! If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. 

Thanks!